Film School

ARTICLES ABOUT FILM SCHOOL BY DATE - PAGE 2

"DIE HARD" goes condo in "The Raid: Redemption," a frenzied Indonesian action movie whose action credentials are through the roof. Here's the brutally simple premise: A team of heavily armored cops enters the ground floor of an apartment high-rise owned and occupied by a crime kingpin protected by several floors of armed thugs. It's an action movie in three acts - automatic weapons, blades, then fists. The higher the cops go, the more elemental the combat. In truth, though, most of the officers don't go very high.

BEFORE Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim were famous for being funny, they were Temple film geeks, watching David Lynch movies and David Byrne videos. "At that point in our lives, the idea of comedy was not something that seemed possible; in fact, it wasn't even a cool thing to think about. We were in bands, or doing film installations. It wasn't like we were ever part of a sketch group," said Heidecker, whose decidedly weird first comedy, "Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie" opens tomorrow.

Members of the Stetson Shutterbugs stepped outside their middle school in Kensington and began sizing up the late afternoon sunlight slanting down on bustling Allegheny Avenue. "Take a look at the way the light is now," teacher Anthony Rocco told the students in his photography club. "You get some really strong shadows. " Clutching donated cameras, the young teens set off down B Street to take pictures of the neighborhood to share with their "photo buddies" in a tiny town in Colombia.

Hello there In 2002, Rebecca, who hails from Abington, and Mike, who grew up near New Orleans, shared a Northwestern University freshman poetry class. "Once we started talking, it felt like we could just talk forever," said Rebecca, who majored in theater and English. Rebecca tried for more conversational opportunities with frequent visits to a friend who lived across the hall from Mike and carefully timed trips to the dining hall. After a year discussing books, movies, and current events, Mike, a film major, asked Rebecca to attend a student play.

LOS ANGELES - It's noon on a warm July day, and filmmaker Will Gluck is worried that he's become a cliche. The 39-year-old writer-director behind the new romantic comedy "Friends With Benefits," starring Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis, is wondering whether he should have hung a framed poster for the 1948 Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn movie "State of the Union" in his sparsely furnished new office at Sony Pictures. The poster, a gift from Kunis, is a bit of a gag, Gluck said - the actress knows how much the boyish-looking New York native detests Hollywood-types who display old movie posters in their offices.

WHEN JOHN Carpenter made the sci-fi hit "Starman" in 1984, the pinnacle of his Hollywood success, he may have been telling a little of his own story. One that began in western Kentucky, where his family moved from New York state when he was 5. This was the early 1950s, a conservative time, and Kentucky was to Carpenter a conservative place. "We were a Yankee family in the South, strangers in a strange land. To me, this was a crazy, Bible Belt place. They didn't understand me, and I didn't understand them," said Carpenter, who'll be honored Monday by the Philadelphia Cinefest with its Phantasmagoria award.

George Nolfi , the man behind the just-released Matt Damon - Emily Blunt thriller The Adjustment Bureau , graduated from a different kind of film school than most folks in the business. There's no name or campus, and the admissions policy is highly selective. It does help to have written a few screenplays - say, an espionage action franchise, maybe ( The Bourne Ultimatum ), or one of those cool A-list heist pics ( Ocean's Twelve ). "I had a couple of really big advantages," concedes Nolfi, who has degrees in public policy (Princeton)

At the Toronto International Film Festival, members of the media interview people from all over the world, but it's rare to interview them while they still have their luggage. Gareth Edwards was at TIFF to talk about his new movie, "Monsters" (opening tomorrow), and the Daily News caught up with him in the bar at the Hyatt Hotel, moments after he'd arrived from London. Fortunately, Edwards was able to sleep on his flight. With "Monsters" appearing in so many festivals, he's become accustomed to snoozing on planes.

LOS ANGELES - Hollywood has always been madly in love with its boy wonders. Everyone knows the stories behind how Orson Welles made "Citizen Kane" at 26 and how Steven Spielberg directed "Duel," his breakthrough TV movie, at 24. But in reality, when it comes to Hollywood success, there have always been the tortoises as well as the hares. The tortoises just don't end up being splashed on the covers of magazines as often. A textbook case for the tortoise school of success is Jay Roach, director of the comedy "Dinner for Schmucks.

Georgie Roland went to L.A. to learn moviemaking, but he came home to small-town Pennsylvania to finish his film education. In the hardscrabble hills of northeastern Pennsylvania, Roland would shed the influence of Hollywood and teach himself how to tell stories about the way people really live. The result was The Town That Was, a documentary about the strange history of Centralia, Pa., a once-thriving mining town in Columbia County that sits atop an underground coal fire that has smoldered since 1962.